PúcaBus — Ghost Bus Catcher

0 buses

An Púca · POO-kah · Irish folklore

What's a Púca?

In Celtic mythology, the Púca is a shapeshifting trickster known for offering weary travellers a ride, only to take them on a wild, chaotic gallop through briars and bogs. If you've ever waited 30 minutes in the lashing rain for a double-decker that vanished the second it reached your stop, you've met the 21st-century Púca.

Legend has it only one man ever tamed the creature: High King Brian Boru, who fashioned a bridle from three hairs of the Púca's own tail and rode it into submission.

It's in Brian's stubborn spirit that we forged PúcaBus. We don't have magical horsehair bridles, but we do have dual-key real-time polling from the NTA, access to state-of-the-art cloud architecture, and this beautiful map. Consider the transit network tamed.

If a bus still vanishes on you, that's the Púca at work — but at least this time we'll have warned you.

Privacy · what the púca knows about you

Almost nothing

The púca is a shapeshifter, not a spy. No accounts, no cookies, no analytics, no trackers. We only ask where you are when you tap Near me, and even then your phone rounds it to about a hundred metres before asking us which stops are close. Your exact position never leaves your phone: a bus tracker that follows you around has missed the point.

A few things are remembered, all in your own browser: whether you like the map light or dark, whether you've been told what a púca is, the stops you've starred and the routes you looked at lately. Clear your browser data and the creature forgets you.

Two strangers see your IP, because your browser fetches from them directly — OpenFreeMap, who serve the map, and Google Fonts, who lend the lettering. Our own server keeps request logs for 30 days, and if you used Near me that rounded position is in them like any other request. Nobody sells anything to anyone.

We do hoard data, and all of it is about buses: every position, every delay, kept so we can measure how often a promised bus never comes. That is the ghost-catching, and not one row of it is about you.

Brian Boru needed three hairs from the púca's tail to tame it. We took nothing from you at all.